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The purpose of this study is to explore linguistic stylometric patterns encompassing lexical, syntactic, structural, sentiment and politeness features that are found in librarians’ responses to user queries.

A total of 462 online texts/transcripts comprising answers of librarians to users’ questions drawn from the Internet Public Library were examined. A Principal Component Analysis, which is a data reduction technique, was conducted on the texts and transcripts. Data analysis illustrates the three principal components that predominantly occur in librarians’ answers: stylometric richness, stylometric brevity and interpersonal support.

The results of the study have important implications in digital information services because stylometric features such as lexical richness, structural clarity and interpersonal support may interplay with the degree of complexity of user queries, the (a)synchronous communication mode, application of information service guideline and manuals and overall characteristics and quality of a given digital information service. Such interplay may bring forth a direct impact on user perceptions and satisfaction regarding interaction with librarians and the information service received through the computer-mediated communication channel.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, the stylometric features encompassing lexical, syntactic, structural, sentiment and politeness using Principal Component Analysis have not been explored in digital information/reference services. Thus, there is an emergent need to explore more fully how linguistic stylometric features interplay with the types of user queries, the asynchronous online communication mode, application of information service guidelines and the quality of a particular digital information service.

The emergence of mobile health (mHealth) products has created a capability of monitoring and managing the health of patients with chronic diseases. These mHealth technologies would not be beneficial unless they are adopted and used by their target users. This study identifies key factors affecting the usage of mHealth apps based on user usage data collected from an mHealth app.

Using a dataset collected from an mHealth app named mPower, developed for patients with Parkinson's disease (PD), this paper investigated the effects of disease diagnosis, disease progression and mHealth app difficulty level on app usage, while controlling for user information. App usage is measured by five different activity counts of the app.

The results across five measures of mHealth app usage vary slightly. On average, previous professional diagnosis and high user performance scores encourage user participation and engagement, while disease progression hinders app usage.

The findings potentially provide insights into better design and promotion of mHealth products and improve the capability of health management of patients with chronic diseases.

Studies on the mHealth app usage are critical but sparse because large-scale and reliable mHealth app usage data are limited. Unlike earlier works based solely on survey data, this research used a large user usage data collected from an mHealth app to study key factors affecting app usage. The methods presented in this study can serve as a pioneering work for the design and promotion of mHealth technologies.

Proper topic selection is an essential prerequisite for the success of research. To study this, this article proposes an important concerned factor of topic selection-topic popularity, to examine the relationship between topic selection and team performance.

The authors adopt extracted entities on the type of gene/protein, which are used as proxies as topics, to keep track of the development of topic popularity. The decision tree model is used to classify the ascending phase and descending phase of entity popularity based on the temporal trend of entity occurrence frequency. Through comparing various dimensions of team performance – academic performance, research funding, relationship between performance and funding and corresponding author's influence at different phases of topic popularity – the relationship between the selected phase of topic popularity and academic performance of research teams can be explored.

First, topic popularity can impact team performance in the academic productivity and their research work's academic influence. Second, topic popularity can affect the quantity and amount of research funding received by teams. Third, topic popularity can impact the promotion effect of funding on team performance. Fourth, topic popularity can impact the influence of the corresponding author on team performance.

This is a new attempt to conduct team-oriented analysis on the relationship between topic selection and academic performance. Through understanding relationships amongst topic popularity, team performance and research funding, the study would be valuable for researchers and policy makers to conduct reasonable decision making on topic selection.

Large terminologies usually contain a mix of terms that are either generic or domain specific, which makes the use of the terminology itself a difficult task that may limit the positive effects of these systems. The purpose of this paper is to systematically evaluate the degree of domain specificity of the AGROVOC controlled vocabulary terms as a representative of a large terminology in the agricultural domain and discuss the generic/specific boundaries across its hierarchy.

A user-oriented study with domain-experts in conjunction with quantitative and systematic analysis. First an in-depth analysis of AGROVOC was carried out to make a proper selection of terms for the experiment. Then domain-experts were asked to classify the terms according to their domain specificity. An evaluation was conducted to analyse the domain-experts’ results. Finally, the resulting data set was automatically compared with the terms in SUMO, an upper ontology and MILO, a mid-level ontology; to analyse the coincidences.

Results show the existence of a high number of generic terms. The motivation for several of the unclear cases is also depicted. The automatic evaluation showed that there is not a direct way to assess the specificity degree of a term by using SUMO and MILO ontologies, however, it provided additional validation of the results gathered from the domain-experts.

The “domain-analysis” concept has long been discussed and it could be addressed from different perspectives. A resume of these perspectives and an explanation of the approach followed in this experiment is included in the background section.

The authors propose an approach to identify the domain specificity of terms in large domain-specific terminologies and a criterion to measure the overall domain specificity of a knowledge organisation system, based on domain-experts analysis. The authors also provide a first insight about using automated measures to determine the degree to which a given term can be considered domain specific. The resulting data set from the domain-experts’ evaluation can be reused as a gold standard for further research about these automatic measures.

International business

Undergraduate/graduate/executive education.

China has become the world's largest producer of automobiles, surpassing the USA and Japan. The Chinese auto industry differs quite significantly from those countries though. While the industry exhibits a substantial degree of concentration in the USA and Japan in early 2011, it remained highly fragmented in China. The Chinese Central Government had announced a desire for consolidation, yet it remained unclear whether a significant shakeout would occur in the near term.

Like many Chinese automakers, Chang'an partnered with well-known global auto makers to develop, produce, and distribute its products. In the coming years, Chang'an hoped to develop more independence from its foreign partners, including the production and distribution of self-branded cars. However, the company grappled with how it could strive for independence while managing its existing joint ventures. Executives worried too about how to compete with foreign automakers who had achieved global economies of scale.

The case provides a rich description of the evolution of the Chinese auto industry, and it documents how the Chinese industry differs from other global markets. Readers can analyze the extent to which they believe scale economies provide foreign firms an advantage over smaller Chinese rivals, and they can evaluate the conventional wisdom regarding the industry's minimum efficient scale. The case also provides a detailed account of Chang'an's rise to prominence. The case concludes by offering an in-depth description of the firm's key rivals, and it presents the key questions being considered by Chang'an executives in 2011.

Enables students to examine how and why an industry's structure can differ substantially across geographic markets.

Enables students to examine whether the need to achieve economies of scale may cause substantial consolidation in the Chinese auto industry.

Provides an opportunity to evaluate the pros and cons of the joint venture strategies employed in China.

Provides an opportunity to examine how a relatively small firm can position itself against large multinationals in a high-growth emerging market.

Teaching notes.

Business intelligence (BI) has been applied in various domains to take better decisions and it provides different level of information to its stakeholders according to the information needs. The purpose of this paper is to present a literature review on recent works in BI. The two principal aims in this survey are to identify areas lacking in recent research, thereby offering potential opportunities for investigation.

To simplify the study on BI literature, it is segregated into seven categories according to the usage. Each category of work is analyzed using parameters such as purpose, domain, problem identified, solution applied, benefit and outcome.

The BI contribution in various domains, ongoing research in BI, the convergence of BI domains, problems and solutions, results of congregated domains, core problems and key solutions. It also outlines BI and its components composition, widely applied BI solutions such as algorithm-based, architecture-based and model-based solutions. Finally, it discusses BI implementation issues and outlines the security and privacy policies adopted in BI environment.

In this survey BI has been discussed in theoretical perspective whereas practical contribution has been given less attention.

A comprehensive survey on BI which identifies areas lacking in recent research and providing potential opportunities for investigation.